


Jump right in and swim until you're free

by impossibletruths



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Ocean, Pre-Canon, Sailing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-02 22:27:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8685694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossibletruths/pseuds/impossibletruths
Summary: On Pike, and the sea, and making whole what once was broken, and being lost before you can be found.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “Atlas Hands” by Benjamin Francis Leftwich off Pike’s spotify playlist.

The sea is lonely, at first.

The sailors know each other, know the slope of the deck, know the rasp of rope across their hands. They know the spray of the water and the sting of the salt and the sigh of the waves, steady like the turn of the world. Pike does not know these things. Pike does not know these people or their world. Pike watches them, eyes shadowed and hungry, and she does not know what she is seeking but she does not find it.

She spends the hours she is not working––and they are few and far between, for there is always work to be done upon the ship, and she has the slope of the deck to learn, and the rasp of rope, and the tricks and turns of life among the emptiness of the ocean––staring out at the horizon, the threshold of the world where sky meets water. Some days it is slate, heavy and low. Some days it is impossibly blue, blinding. Some days it is close enough to reach out and touch; some days it is impossibly far away. Some days it is a gaping, hungry mouth, ready to swallow everything. Some days it is closed tight. 

Those are bad days, when the horizon is locked away.

The sea is a lonely, lonely place.

* * *

Sometimes, she writes letters.

_Dear Scanlan_ , they say. They often start with _Dear Scanlan_. Sometimes start _Dear Keyleth_ or _Dear Vax_ or _Dear Percy._ Other times they start _Dear Vex_ or _Dear Tiberius._ They start with _Dear Grog_ too, but they never get much farther than that, because she likes to pretend she might send them, even though she won’t, and Grog can’t read, and her words to him are private things to hear from her alone, so she doesn’t often start with _Dear Grog_.

A few start with _Dear Everyone_ but that is too big, and she can never think of what to say, except _I’m okay_ (even though she isn’t) and _I like it here_ (even though she doesn’t) and _I’ll be back soon_ (even though she won’t).

So, most of them start with _Dear Scanlan_. She doesn’t know why.

* * *

The first storm they weather––well, not the first; the crew of the  _Broken Howl_  has been weathering storms long before she joined, and she is sure they will continue long after she is gone––nearly breaks her.

The sun rises red and swollen in the morning, and the sailors whisper all the day long, and the deck hums with the tension of waiting. Pike is a healer; she knows the tension of waiting. The captain stands at the helm, and high in the crows nest the lookout scans the skies, and they wait, and wait, and wait.

It comes upon them as the sun begins to turn towards the earth, early in the afternoon. Grey clouds race across the sky, heavy and distended and quick like lightning, blotting out the sun. They bring with them a tremendous wind, and the captain turns them into it to keep them steady, but the waves still rise above the ship, washing them across the deck like driftwood when water crashes over the hull. The world shrinks in an instant; the sea becomes tiny. She knows nothing but the spray of water and the lighting crackling above and the wind that whips her hair about her face, and she is cold and coughing and blind, wood and rope groaning and twisting, the ship a beast frightened to life. And she is afraid, she is so afraid, she is going to die (again) and her family is not with her, and she thinks it is unfair that she left them to find herself and seeking freedom is going to be what kills her.

The storm rages all afternoon and into the evening, and Pike counts the waves, waiting for the crashing wall of water that will sweep her overboard, that will crack them in two. She waits for it all to end, heart beating rabbit-fast in her ribcage as she pulls herself across the deck, purpose the only thing holding her together, and she waits, and works, and sweats, and sobs, and––

It passes.

Late in the evening, the storm blows itself out, and the seas calm, an inky darkness that mirrors the open sky above, the stars glittering far away in the firmament, as if scattered there by some higher power, and Pike cannot even feel relief among her exhaustion, skin raw with salt, both hers and the seas.

“See?” the bosun laughs when he sees her slumped against the mizzen. He lovingly pats the sea-soaked wood. “As long as we’ve got faith, she'll make it through.”

Pike knows a lot about faith. It’s not the ship or the sea she doubts.

* * *

_Dear Scanlan_ , she writes. _We almost died today, but we didn’t, so I guess everything’s all right._

It isn’t, of course, but it’s better than being dead. Been there and done that.

She didn’t think she’d have to face that too, out here on the sea. She doesn’t know why. It seems foolish, now. But there you go. She’s always been a little bit foolish.

* * *

There’s a man aboard named Reen and he plays the pipes. He doesn’t play them particularly well, Pike thinks to herself before she realizes she’s comparing him to Scanlan. For all his bravado and egoism, Scanlan has the talent to back up his outrageousness, and that’s not particularly fair to Reen.

When she stops comparing him to Scanlan, Reen plays a lot better.

Reen plays the pipes, and the sailors dance, and Pike sits at the edge of the crowd, where the spray of the sea kicked up by the hull cutting through the water brushes the back of her neck. It feels off, like a knot that has been badly tied and will need to be pulled apart before it can be fixed, but she knows the weave of the rope and the strain and strength and heft of a well-tied knot, and she thinks that’s a good step forward.

* * *

_Dear Scanlan_ , she writes. _There’s a man who plays music like you. I miss you. Yes, I’m surprised too. And they dance a lot. I think you’d like it. You’d probably be really good at it._

Or maybe not, she thinks as she folds this letter and puts it with all the others she will not send. She’s never seen him dance like this. She wonders if he knows how.

* * *

Every time they make the trip north from Marquet they skirt the archipelago. The sailors murmur about it, superstitious in the way of hardened folk. Pike learns their stories and murmurs them too.

She learns lots of stories. She doesn’t have the knack for telling them, not like the old and weathered sailors who know the sea better than a lover. She has the ear to listen, though, and a quiet belief in hidden truths. She wouldn’t be a cleric if she didn’t believe in things like that.

The ship rocks, and shifts, and heaves, and storms and winds come and go, and they tell stories, and Pike listens, and they stir in her a different sort of faith––still not in herself, but in something more personal than the sea.

Though, she’s learning that there’s nothing quite so personal as the sea.

The stories remind her of Scanlan too, but not the same way. They’re more like the twins, parts of different wholes, not the same but similar. They work apart, but are better together.

Maybe that’s not just the twins. Maybe that’s all of them. She misses Grog, and Wilhand, and doesn’t feel homesick.

* * *

_Dear Keyleth_ , she writes. _I hear there are druids here. One of the sailors talked about them yesterday. He says they live at the sea side and breathe water, and drag men to their doom. I told them that was ridiculous and druids are nothing like that. I think I convinced them. I miss all of you a lot. I think I might come home soon. Not quite yet, but soon._

* * *

They pick up a new hand in a nowhere port, a dwarf with a hollow face and distant eyes. Pike recognizes the look, recognizes her own almost-reflection, and finds herself studying the captain with a keener eye as the ship inches ponderously out of the bay and back to the familiarity of open water.

* * *

_Dear Percy,_ she writes. _I know you used to be a sailor. Maybe that’s why I decided to try. Did it work for you? It’s hard to tell. There’s not a lot of time for thinking, and there’s too much time. At least my hair can’t get any whiter. It makes you look very distinguished, though._

She wonders if all captains pick up strays. She doesn’t wonder why the dwarf is running. The sea is a good place to lose yourself, and something has to be lost before it’s found. That’s what Wilhand says, anyways. It makes sense.

She’s a little lost, and a little broken, but only broken things can be made whole again.

It takes a lot of salt to get there, though.

* * *

(There are letters she does not address, that speak of shared stars and wanting and the pull of hearts across the oceans. She burns those letters.)

* * *

She has trouble letting go of the voices that hound her. She spends too long trying to block them out and they dig into the cracks of her, whisper and scream, even when closes her eyes and tells herself they aren’t real. She dreams of blood and pain and has woken her bunkmates too often with her nightmares. But she’s getting better. A little, anyways.

They don’t seem to mind too much. Reen winks at her and plays his same few songs, and Pike stops seeing Scanlan every time she looks at him and smiles back.

Eventually, the voices wear her down, waves on rocks, grind her to little pieces. Except it isn’t the voices, it’s the sea itself, hours beneath the sun among the water and the salt. When she stops ignoring them enough to listen, all she hears is the steady sigh of the ocean and the call of the gulls that means land ahead. Her hands are callused, her face sun-kissed, her freckles like stars. Reen winks at her, and the bosun grins, and Pike climbs the rigging with ease, and doesn’t know when she learned how to do these things. She has new scars, new stories, new strength. She has been ground down like glass, smoothed over and shaped into something not-better and not-worse, only new.

At night, when they dance, Pike finds she knows the steps.

* * *

_Do you know what keeps a ship afloat?_ she writes. _It’s love. It keeps her whole in a storm and steady among the wind and the waves. It tells you when you need more give and when to take in the line. It pulls you in, and it makes a place home._

_I love this ship. I love her from her wooden keel to the top of the main; I love her paint and her tar and her rope and oil and canvas. I love these people._

_I think I’m ready to come home._

* * *

The sea isn’t lonely at all.

It takes a lot of looking to see. And it takes not looking at all, really; it’s no wonder it took her so long to find it, because she’s been searching and searching, as if there are answers, when there aren’t. There’s just the sea.

(The cure for anything is salt water.)

Reen winks when she leaves. The captain clasps her arm and she glances past him to the dwarf they picked up, and smiles a knowing smile.

“Keep a weather eye,” he says with a nod.

“Smooth sailing and safe harbors,” she wishes him.

Leaving feels like letting go. She turns her face towards the setting sun and does not look back. The sea crashes at her back, steady as the day is long and old as the turn of the world.

It will be there when she needs it again.

* * *

She follows a half-remembered path and eventually passes beyond the city’s walls to a wide green field where a keep sits, wooden scaffolding around its highest tower. The gates are open, unguarded, and she enters unnoticed, pack strapped tight to her back, face dark from the sun and dusted with freckles. She walks with the roll of the ground, feet sure and steady.

“Hi Grog,” she says, and her best friend looks up from where he wrestles with Trinket in the dusty grass of the yard. His face transforms.

“Pike!” he bellows. He sweeps her up, and he smells like sweat and leather and stone, and she laughs and wraps her arms around his neck.

“Aw, buddy,” she says. He laughs with her as Keyleth comes running around the corner and Vex appears with her brother in tow, and there is Percy, and Tiberius, and Scanlan the scoundrel, and Grog puts her down so she can hug them all, see their changes with her own changed eyes. She feels worn beneath their gazes, but a familiar sort of worn: the wear of the sun and the ocean painted across her face, hands callused and skin darker, eyes bright and hair cut short and messy in the way of sailors. Her grin is the broad, open horizon.

Here is her ocean, her big-wide-full sea, and she sails upon it, solid and certain in the way of well-loved ships.

“Well,” she says, letters in her pack and her bones light in a way they have not felt in months. “I’m home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Pike's last letter shamelessly riffed from Serenity because I love Firefly.
> 
> find me on tumblr at [teammompike](http://teammompike.tumblr.com)


End file.
